The Qivittoq

Deep Greenlandic Inuit folklore of the mountain wanderers

A qivittoq, plural qivittut, is someone who has left the community for the Greenland wilderness to live alone, by choice or in exile. Since nobody could survive that country alone, people came to believe the outcast became a spirit, a wanderer of the highlands, and Greenland.is adds that a qivittoq is thought able to take the shape of any animal. The belief is far from gone. Visit Greenland says a local's story of a trip into the wild may well include sighting a qivittoq, and visitors who ask can hear many tales of these wandering spirits.

Bjarne Grønnow of the National Museum of Denmark has traced where they belonged in the older Inuit world. The historic Inuit of western Greenland lived from the sea, but each summer families travelled far into Nunap Timaa, the Inland, to spend a few weeks hunting caribou and fishing for char on the high plains beside the ice. It was a season of feasting and socialising, and also a dangerous one: the interior was haunted by qivittut and by ghosts, inland people, giants and animal monsters, all of them gathered in a database of legends and tales from 19th-century West Greenland. The Inuit felt torn about the Inland and the ice cap, a dangerous zone between worlds that still held an important place in how they saw the world.

The same body of belief holds the tupilaq, an avenging monster that an angakkuq, a shaman, made in secret from animal bone, skin, hair and sinew, brought to life with chants and set in the sea to destroy a particular enemy. If the target had greater magical powers, it could be sent back to kill its maker, whose only escape was public confession. None of the real ones survive, being made in isolated places from perishable materials. When early European visitors asked what a tupilaq looked like, carvers began making them from sperm whale teeth, and tupilait of narwhal and walrus tusk, wood and caribou antler are now highly prized Greenlandic art.

The wanderer reached the cinema in 1956 with Erik Balling's Qivitoq, filmed entirely on location in Greenland and nominated for both the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the Palme d'Or. This is living folklore, and it is told here with respect.